"Turning Towards Love" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday September 8, 2024
Scripture Reading:  Mark 7:24-37

This week was our annual church picnic (even though the weather pushed our worship and potluck lunch inside). The service also included a baptism and communion.


Our scripture reading this week was actually two stories back-to-back.  The second story is the story of Jesus giving hearing and speech to a man who was deaf. We have lots of healing stories if you read through the gospels, so I’m going to save this story for a different day.  Instead, today I want to dig into the first story from the passage because, at least to me, it is a much more challenging story.

 

To me, the most challenging part of this story is how Jesus responds to his visitor.  She is a Syrophoenician woman – a foreign woman – a woman from outside of the faith that Jesus lived in.  She came to Jesus looking for healing for her daughter, and Jesus’s response was to say:  “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

 

On the surface, this should probably be the expected response.  Men from the time and place where Jesus lived weren’t expected to have anything to do with women.  And then add the complication of the fact that she was a foreigner – she wasn’t Jewish – and Jesus, as a Jewish man of his time and place definitely shouldn’t have had anything to do with her.

 

But I expect more from Jesus.  Because I believe that Jesus is the embodiment of God – literally God in the form of flesh and blood – I expect more from Jesus.

 

He could have just said no, but instead he insults his visitor by implying that she is a dog, and this wasn’t meant as a compliment – in contemporary English, he would be calling her by a fairly rude name that begins with B.

 

I’m also troubled by the fact that his initial response implies that there is some sort of scarcity around love and grace and healing – that if her were to heal the foreign woman’s daughter, that there would be less healing available for his own people.

 

Like I said, I find this to be one of the most challenging stories in the gospels.

 

But to me, what redeems this story is the ending.  The unnamed Syrophoenician woman doesn’t accept Jesus’s first answer.  She doesn’t just go away, go back to her sick daughter.  Instead, she argues back.

 

If Jesus’s initial response was the expected response for his time and place, her reaction is completely unexpected.  For a foreign woman to argue back with a man in that time and place is completely counter-cultural.

 

But she does.  She tells Jesus:  “Even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”  She gives Jesus a message of abundance – even when it seems like everything is gone, there is still more than enough to go around.

 

And with her response, Jesus changes his answer to her.  He doesn’t stubbornly insist on his first answer.  He doesn’t insist that only he can be right.  Instead, he hears her voice, he acknowledges that he was wrong, and he heals the woman’s daughter.

 

It’s still not a perfect story to me.  I would still have preferred it if Jesus had healed her daughter on the first request.  But maybe Jesus can teach us something new with this story.  Maybe Jesus is modeling for us what repentance can look like.

 

Repentance is more than just saying that we are sorry, and it’s more than just feeling sorry for what we have done.  Repentance is changing our path, changing our ways, turning away from the wrongs that we have done.  Jesus didn’t just say to the women, “I’m sorry for calling you a dog, and I’m sorry for not healing your daughter.”  Instead, Jesus turned away from the path that he had been on, and healed the woman’s daughter.

 

And the changed path seems to have stuck for him; and this is where I think that the second story in the reading comes in.  In the second story, Jesus is travelling in the Decapolis, which is on the far side of the Sea of Galilee.  Jesus is in foreign territory here.  And even though he isn’t named as a foreigner, when they bring him a man in need of healing in this foreign land, we can assume that there is a pretty good chance that Jesus is dealing with another foreigner here.  And instead of calling him a dog and telling him that he doesn’t have healing to go around, instead, Jesus heals the man brought to him.  Jesus has not only learned with his head from the Syrophoenician woman, but he has changed his ways because of her.

 

I still believe that Jesus is the flesh-and-blood version of God, but Jesus was also fully human at the same time.  In that first story, he reacted exactly the way that you would expect a human to react, even if his reaction was less than loving, less than compassionate, less than grace-filled.  But then his response, when he realized that he had messed up was to do exactly what all of us should do when we realize that we’ve messed up.  He changed his ways towards goodness and love.

 

And so not only does Jesus, God’s Word-Made-Flesh, teach us about who God is; but Jesus, fully human, can also teach us about how to be human, how to turn towards God, and how to live love more fully in the world that we inhabit.

 

And when we mess up or miss the mark, may the Holy Spirit always be turning us towards love.  Amen.

 

 

Image:  “Baptismal Font” by Bill Herndon on flickr

Used with Permission